The Ritual (Vale)

By way of explanation, this is another fel-driven nightmare akin to the one in Blood of My Blood. As Vale struggles to confront the voidwalker screwing with her head, she's also combating violent dreams that have seemed, up until the end of them, very much like reality.

The character of Vale's old teacher is described fairly simply in the short piece The Eye of Shadow if any more background is wanted.

Thank you, as always, for reading - and if you have any comments, questions, or critiques I'd be very grateful for them.

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The Ritual

'My Valerias,' the ancient man muttered, crouching with a strange grace and reaching a craggy finger to the dirt floor of the dimlit hovel. He began to trace runes in the dust, and it was a long time before he spoke again. 'You will become great someday,' he said as he paused in the tracing, his eyes fixed on the lines and curves of his work. And then he looked up, and the skin stretched across his face twitched with what might have been a smile.

Vale felt her own face twist into the ghastly echo of a response, dropping from the stool on which she sat to kneel in the dust beside him. It was a dark dust, coating a floor that had known too many years of runes drawn and then smoothed over: she could smell the blood in it, the echoes of magic and of sacrifice performed again and again until the power of the rituals had seeped into the earth itself. She dragged her head upward to look into the ancient, ageless face beneath the cowl that tonight shadowed it.

'And how will I become great?' she whispered, and her voice was as a dry rustling of old parchments, left for too long to gather the moth-dust of the years.

The ancient man raised his head, and his sallow cheeks seemed almost young again in the eerie silver-and-sable flickering of the brazier opposite him. 'By blood, for it is your own path. By your blood, and by the memory of blood.'

He lifted a hand and began to trace runes in the air, the very darkness that had lain dormant like a sleeping cat before the door beginning to hum with a distant murmur of power, like the faint echo of drums from somewhere beyond the hills. Time seemed to still as the runes began to draw together, forming and reforming into a glimmer of deep silver flame, and Vale felt her throat tightening. Such was the power that her master summoned from the threads of his soul, and it was a dark, beautiful thing, as it was when she had looked up from the forest of her birth to see the spectral moon drifting out from behind a ragged twist of cloud.

And then at last the silver-threaded runes wavered and reformed a final time, and shone as the pale outline of a blade.

The man looked up toward Vale who knelt before him, and stretched out a hand. 'Take it,' he whispered, and it was the whisper of a vast and tumbling waterfall that swept away all resistance.

She hesitated, not knowing why; the low brazier still burned as it had before, licking hungrily at its unknown fuel and bathing the hovel in familiar ritual shadows. This was the shadow of her master's flame, and the man before her was one who knew her infinitely well, whose words had guided her, whose runes had fed the hunger of her desire, whose sunken eyes had made her own leap with a cold violet flame. He was her master of the shadow, upon whom she had built her power.

And yet...

Her fingertips reached out toward the rune-dagger threaded in the air, and then once again her muscles stayed their movement. There was such a strange note in the throbbing of the magic, now, coming to her ears as the beat of an approaching drum, and she had the sudden needling idea that there was some thing that she had forgotten, some thing she wanted desperately to remember.

She reached out again, and the uneasy light of the brazier, in which a vague tongue of green flame had begun to weave itself among the shadows, was like the wavering of her own heart. Only her master's eyes were steady: those cold, deep eyes, unsearchable as as a storm sweeping across the Barrens and darkening the sun at midday; as violent as the heart of a blaze and as patient as the murmurs of a long-silent forest.

'You will become great,' he had said, and she knew that he never lied. Yet still there was something that held her back.

'Your life is bound by blood, my Valerias,' said the ancient man, settling back against his ankles and speaking to her with the quiet of the outgoing tide lapping softly against the tidepools. 'Do you doubt me?'

No, of course she did not doubt, for her life had been formed by blood from the beginning, bathed in it and given meaning by the blows she had received and by the lives she had torn from the world.

And then, as suddenly as though a veil had been lifted from her eyes, she saw what had crept up around them in the thrumming of the magic, and her heart was seized within her breast.

A figure crouched in the shadows behind the shadowflame; a wraith of a figure, an unknown ghost beneath a velvet mask. It was only an outline, like the blade, as if it had yet to be brought fully into being, yet the power that emanated from it as black and rank as the smell of fear. This, then, was the sum of the ritual: this was her test.

'What... must I do?' she asked, knowing the answer even as she said it, while the dagger formed of ever-gleaming runes burned like molten silver in the darkness before her.

Ancient lips cracked into words, and the master lifted a hand to point toward the shadowformed blade. 'Take up the blade,' he said, and his voice was as the distant rumbling of thunder over the sea.

Vale closed her fingers around the luminous hilt. And then the rage rose within her, a rage not her own, surging upward like a wave at the height of the tide, roaring and swelling upward until it threatened to crash against the cliffs of the shore. She was Valerias Caan, bound by blood and chosen by blood, and this was her hour.

Gripping the blade, she made it her own, drawing it to her with all of the shadow that flowed within her. She whirled around, then, lunging straight for the figure as it suddenly tore itself from the shadows with a shriek like a carrion crow with the promise of death on its wings.

The figure before her lunged outward to claw at her face, its fingers so pale as to be almost skeletal, and in the clear, sudden moment in which she held the knife upraised in her hand, the moment between life and death, she heard the hollow sound of laughter rising up like the swell of the surf in her ears. She knew that laughter; it was akin to that thing, a thing so important, that she had wanted to remember...

And a hand gripped her wrist; not skeletal but warm and full of the pounding of blood, but the grip around her veins was like bands of iron.

'Gar... then?'

She shuddered suddenly, the scene of her old master's hovel and the skeletal wraith dissolving around her, leaving only the pale, bearded face of a man sitting up among dishevelled silken sheets, holding her wrist so tightly that the bone might yet shatter.

'Garthen,' she whispered, and the knife fell onto the coverlet and then slid with a ring of steel to the flagstones beneath her feet. And as her gaze fell on the shadowed, unshaven face, she turned away before she could see what lay behind his eyes.